Does mind warping count?

Dear all,

After discussing with Wendy last week regarding the flu season, or the approaching thereof, during which I was convinced it couldn't be arriving this early, it looks like I'm coming down with something. The irony is not lost on me.
I went to get my previous year's photo printed today, but there were issues with the in-store printer, so I ended up not being able to pick them up (all 197 of them -- the past year has been...eventful) until much later, which means I'll be picking them up next Saturday, due to my schedule. Wendy's and her family are going on a short vacation to visit her sister in law, who's stationed in Germany, starting next week, so our lab will be down one person again (and in the meantime I'm helping with the care of her mice, so I really can't afford to be getting sick).

Unrelated are a series of hilarious things that I have encountered that I don't believe I've mentioned:

1) Advertisement for "light therapy" posted near 99 Ranch. It claims to cure diabetes, broken bones, sprains, aches, and possibly cancer. I am not sure what this "light therapy" entails.  Is it therapy with light? (The character for "light" is the one used to for the noun of the radiation type, not the adjective to describe weight.) Do they shine a light on you for this therapy? What is this magical light and where does it fall on the EM spectrum? Because it's light right? Which means that we can detect it with our eyes as light? I mean yes light are made of photons which do have energy, but to the best of my knowledge, the energy from the visible spectrum can fuel a) heat, possibly for metabolism if you're a member of the cold-blooded species, b) photosynthesis, if you are a plant, c) vitamin D synthesis, which is important for bone development, so it is vaguely related but I have no idea how the diabetes thing ties in and d) thyamine dimers, which can cause skin cancer.

...guys...guys, I don't understand. This is weirder than the chloroplast extract supplements.

2) My packaged of steamed bread, which advised me to "warp the bread before microwaving". Bread is fairly soft, so warping isn't hard. I can warp it a number of degrees in a number of ways. Too bad the instructions didn't detail what is the preferred method of warp, so I may be missing out on the optimal tastiness due to sub-optimal warping. That makes me think of space-time continuum and warp speed. I wish I can warp bread in that sense. Then again, if I can warp bread in that sense, why on earth would I be warping bread...?

In any case:  you'd think with all the PR and efforts they put into advertisement, someone would've invested more time in spell checker than just running things through a word processing program (ah aldehyde, I will never look at you the same again). Current evidence would suggest otherwise, however, and all the typos on Chinese food packaging gives me a weird urge to say "Ai-yaaaa", though I don't actually say "Ai-yaa" -- not even when Mandarin was the only language I spoke. But.

Aiyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

3) Karin is making us do a bunch of yoga stretches so we don't end up needing knee surgery by the time we are fifty, which I appreciate. I don't exactly appreciate all the weird positions, though, and neither do most of my classmates. Thankfully there is a very large mat (yoga-people, I hear, don't use mats -- this strikes me as either very brave or very masochistic...possibly both) for when we decided to rename the "humbled warrior" pose to "crumpled warrior".

4) The thesis adviser randomly appearing in lab with a cardboard tube (like the one in the center of a roll of gift wrapping paper) and informed me that if anyone harassed me I can beat them with it. After some contemplation, labmates and I decided that this was an attempt at humor, but this is pretty weird, even for him.... And then he was trying to explain something about cut off points and Greeks and beards, which none of us followed. However, to this point I think the weirdest analogy from him remains the one comparing finding protein targets to hunting for purple aliens in the NY subway. ( I mean, what??)

Oooo tea's done. More fluid.